Dr. Abshire's areas of specialty are in the fields of VLSI circuit design and bioengineering. Dr. Abshire's research focuses on better understanding the tradeoffs between performance and resources in natural and engineered systems. Prior to her arrival at the University of Maryland in November, 2001, she was a graduate student in the Sensory Communications and Microsystems Lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. Her advisor was Andreas G. Andreou, and her dissertation topic was Sensory Information Processing Under Physical Constraints.

Dr. Abshire was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and grew up in the Roanoke Valley in southwestern Virginia. She graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1988 from Salem High School in Salem, VA. From 1985 to 1988 she also attended the Roanoke Valley Governor's School for Science and Technology in Roanoke, VA. She received her B.S. degree in Physics with Honor in 1992 from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.

Between 1992 and 1995 she worked as a Research Engineer in the Bradycardia Research Department of Medtronic, Inc. in Minneapolis, MN. In 1995 she began her graduate education in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University.